Friday, June 21, 2013

...I'm not lazy but life is going to fast right now. The end of the school year was a bear. The wind has been blowing like crazy since the start of May and so outdoor activities are a bit limited.

I also am working as the Rio Grande Country Tourism Assistant, was working a trade show for them at the end of May, teaching morning swim lessons this summer, am working on my Masters of Education and am taking on two new core classes next year since we had a teacher in my department move on.

We haven't done a whole lot this spring and summer. So I'll back track a little to keep things in order and try to stay more updated as we have some fun summer events planned.

AND...
A BIG AND...
Keep us all in your thoughts and prayers. The West Fork Complex Fire has moved into the San Luis Valley. I live far enough from the forest in the plains and so we are safe - I'm no longer firefighting due to family, kiddos, etc...but many of my friends and colleagues are affected by this. The town of South Fork, and possible Creede and parts of Del Norte are in danger of burning. Keep your fingers crossed that nobody is hurt, nothing is destroyed and this fire rages through depleting future mega fire problems due to the high incidence of beetle killed trees and poor forest mitigation. It's very frustrating to me because I worked on much of this part of the forest trying to mark out dead and dying trees to use as lumber, but tree-huggers got upset since we weren't letting nature take its course and so took it to court, and so therefore all this dead wood is just sitting there...waiting for a lightning strike. Which is what happened. Now people's homes and business might burn instead. It's hard to know that this timber could have been removed and used for production, instead of being burned up and causing these Maga-fires that we have been experiencing. In all my years of studying fire behavior and working on a fire crew I have never seen any fire move like these fires are doing. It is terrifying. This picture was taken two nights ago before it made a seven mile, 8,000 acre run last night.

This is what it looks like right now - you can see the smoke rolling through the valley. It looks like it's just a few miles away when it fact it's over 40. Nate was working in Del Norte but there is hot ash and so much smoke they had to leave.